Alt-J: 'All the coolest bands are completely normal'

Alt-J: 'All the coolest bands are completely normal'

Having won a Mercury prize and sold 1m albums, Alt-J lost a member and faced a backlash. But, Miley Cyrus is a fan and their US label reckons they've made a 'big single'. Time to get the shots in, surely?

Alt-J are cheerfully recounting the time they were hired to play a corporate awayday for a Russian telecoms company in Iceland. “The guy who organised it was a big fan of ours, but no one else knew who we were,” explains keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton. “The theme was an authentic Viking feast in a Viking long hall, so they were all dressed as Vikings, eating roast ox and getting drunk on mead.” Singer and guitarist Joe Newman goes on: “We were hours out of Reykjavik. Night was creeping in and the temperature was dropping, so you couldn’t leave the hall without blistering from the cold. There was a point when they were getting quite rowdy and I thought, ‘Is this gonna turn?’”

It’s not the only time Joe has feared for the future of Alt-J. In January of this year, guitarist and founding member Gwil Sainsbury quit the band, having decided that the life of a professional touring musician was not for him. Today, Joe admits, his voice wavering for a moment, that the departure of the band’s “silent leader” was almost fatal. “I didn’t think we were going to pick ourselves up,” he says.

It’s fair to say that, until that point, things had been going almost too well for this band of inherent worriers. An Awesome Wave, the album of intimate folktronica they conceived in their Leeds student digs, scooped the 2012 Mercury prize on its way to selling a million copies worldwide. Alt-J never really had to slog to promote it, and were able to hide behind a faintly enigmatic non-image while the music did the talking, propagating via word-of-mouth both online and off. Last month, they sold out Alexandra Palace in less than 10 minutes. And yet you’d still struggle to identify a single member of the band if they accidentally barged your trolley in Waitrose. They appeared to have found the holy grail for indie bands: success without the fame.

But success brings its own pressures, especially if you’re not prepared for it. Even at the time, one of the words Alt-J used to described their Mercury prize win was “traumatic”; amid the celebrations, they were keenly aware that their lives had just changed forever. “It’s quite a funny feeling, being on top of the world,” says Gus, “because at what point are you going to topple off?” Pretty soon, as it turned out. The backlash has been harsh, with Alt-J routinely called out in the press for being boring and geeky – the “bland band”, as one Guardian headline put it. Even Bryan Ferry had a pop when interviewed for Noisey, deriding Alt-J’s “celebration of normality”. The scrutiny clearly rocked these sensitive fellows; Joe stopped doing interviews soon after the Mercury win and is still feeling his way back. When Gwil left, it only intensified the pressure on the reluctant frontman. “I thought it would all fall on my shoulders and I wouldn’t be able to carry the weight,” he says quietly. “But we dug our heels in.”

Forced to regroup, Alt-J’s forthcoming second album This Is All Yours leans more heavily on drummer Thom Green’s mastery of Ableton and other sample-based technologies; as a result the songs are less fussy, more expansive and direct. While they have chosen not to replace Gwil, slow-burning lead single Hunger Of The Pine introduces an unofficial new fourth member. And the female voice you can hear as the song gathers momentum is none other than that of twerking controversy-magnet and underrated ballad-belter Miley Cyrus.

“She’s a fan of Alt-J,” beams Thom. “She uses a snippet of Fitzpleasure in her live show, so I sent her a message on Twitter asking if she wanted a remix. She emailed me the stems to her song 4x4 and we noticed one of her parts fitted perfectly over a guitar riff Joe was playing. It was a bit like, ‘What are we doing?’ But we all warmed to it. It’s not so much that it’s Miley Cyrus, it just sounds good.”

“It’s funny, because I’m not such a big fan of the original song,” confides Gus. “It’s this bouncy, jaunty pop song. But when you take that line out of context – ‘I’m a female rebel’ – it sounds amazing. When you hear her vocal by itself, it’s got a real purity and punchiness to it.” And he’s right: in this new context, Miley sounds defiant, imperious.

Not everyone was so thrilled about Hunger Of The Pine. Another hazard of success is that the suits start sticking their oars in, and Alt-J’s American label didn’t view the song as a “big single”, apparently ignoring the fact that An Awesome Wave did pretty well without one. Hackles (mildly) raised, Alt-J resolved to write “the least Alt-J song ever”, taking a “joke riff” Joe had been playing in rehearsals and fleshing it out with the most perfunctory chords and rhythm imaginable. Whereas the band typically spend weeks agonising over every note, Left Hand Free was written “in about 20 minutes”. Needless to say, the US label loved it.

Thom: “I tried to make the drums as cliched as possible, there’s none of my personality in it.”

Gus: “I’m doing some kind of organ solo. I don’t know where ‘baby’ came from.”

Joe: “And I say, ‘Gee whizz,’ which I’m not sure is a phrase I’ve ever uttered before. I can imagine it appealing to American truckers with Good Riddance To Bin Laden stickers!”

“Oh God…” says Gus, a worrying realisation dawning. “Someone’s going to walk onstage to it at an NRA convention.”

In truth, Left Hand Free sounds rather more like Odelay-era Beck than Ted Nugent, but it’s undeniably catchy. If it turns Alt-J into accidental one-hit wonders in the red states, then they’re ready for it. Kind of.

“Let’s see if it becomes a hit first,” cautions Gus. “We might be no-hit wonders.”

While the lyrical tricksiness of the first album has been toned down, you may still struggle to glean any obvious narratives from Joe’s jumble of esoteric references. With regard to The Gospel Of John Hurt, which concerns the emotional impact of watching the memorable stomach-bursting scene from Alien for the first time, Joe says, “That scene has stayed with me. As a writer, you’re meant to sift through all of things you’ve remembered in your life and pinpoint the things you’ve been moved by. Why not write about those moments you’re moved by the most?”

Clearly, he’s uncomfortable with the idea that rock singers are expected to bare their souls, although his typically English anxiety becomes a telling feature of the music itself. At first, Alt-J were able to hide behind their delta symbol, the band’s anonymity adding to their mystique. But there came a point, says Joe, when “we started losing the ability to say no without coming across like twats”. The irony being that as soon as Alt-J relented to the photo requests, they were slated for looking like biology students.

“We’re not deliberately being an anti-rock band,” protests Gus. “If you came on tour with us, you’d see us get drunk and do a lot of silly stuff. We’re not literally reading aloud from The River Cottage Year and knitting cardigans – we just don’t turn up in leather jackets and sunglasses and get the shots in for a lunchtime interview with the Guardian.”

Joe, it should be pointed out, has just followed a mojito with an espresso martini. “That’s only because I didn’t want to appear normcore, I want to have an edge!” he yells.

“I quite like people thinking that we’re normal, cos we are,” decides Thom, whose leg is currently in a brace, not as a result of any rock’n’roll hi-jinks but because he fractured his ankle running for a taxi on Regent Street. “I think we do make interesting music, and I’d rather have that than make average music and have to compensate by being ridiculous people. To me, the coolest bands are Portishead and Radiohead, who are completely normal.”

Adds Gus, “You’re never going to have ‘My crazy three days on the road in America with Alt-J’ where I’m on drugs and Joe’s in prison because he bottled someone.”

To be fair, though, bands haven’t really acted like that since the 80s. Kids don’t buy the escapist rock’n’roll fantasy any more, they know it’s a lie. They want their bands to embody their own anxieties and reduced expectations. They want a band just like them – and Alt-J fit the bill.

“Take Jimmy Page,” says Joe, downing the last of his cocktail while resisting the urge to smash the empty glass on the floor. “He led a disgustingly rock’n’roll lifestyle, but for every good story he probably upset a lot of people, and I couldn’t do that. If I throw a TV out of a window, I know someone’s going to have to clear it up. And also it could land on someone! If I wasn’t in a band I wouldn’t do that. So why does it have to change because I write music?”